Timothy Noah Quotes

I was never a left-winger, actually. I was a pretend left-winger because it was more interesting than being a right-winger.

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

I am not a centrist.

I don't trust liberals, I trust conservatives.

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

A liberal is a conservative who's been indicted.

The media will not admit that Trump's America and Sanders' America are as different as Venus and Mars: they represent a very polarized America with two different answers to the question, 'Who are we?'

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

I know it is very hard to rise above the influences of party prejudice. Often, it almost drowns the sentiment of patriotism. Party rancor and party hatred are the last serpents which the genius of patriotism can crush.

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.

My audience is much more center right, or centrist.

In college, I was a fiercely committed Democrat - a meeting with Jack Kemp, then Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, challenged my blind partisanship.

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

I do have friends that are Republicans, and we have very spirited conversations on a whole range of issues. I am often baffled by why they are Republicans, but I enjoy the dialogue and can move beyond politics to find common ground in my personal relationships.

One tell-tale sign of a Wingnut: they always confuse partisanship with patriotism.

There's something about Barack Obama that induces Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The Right envisions a vile socialist, while many on the Left picture an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

As in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Without a strong voice for more moderate leadership, the Tea Party is filling that vacuum.

We are now living in a post-Roosevelt, post-Reagan universe. What comes next will not be post-partisan, because faction is an intrinsic human impulse.

Does politics have to be injected into everything?

When I watch a guy I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks I probably wouldn't like this person if I met him, or we would have different opinions.

I'm sort of the Antichrist to the Conservative Party.

My dad thinks Obama is a socialist and all these extreme views.